The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.

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Saturday, January 31, 2015

The bankrupt SkyMall catalog may be rescued by a former Shark Tank contestant. Scott Jordan, the chief executive of a company that makes clothes with pockets specially designed for smartphones and other gadgets, plans to bid for SkyMall's assets. . . . SkyMall, a mail order catalog that has been found in seat-back pockets on airplanes for 25 years, filed for bankruptcy last week. It was famous for selling gadgets aimed at travelers, as well as variety of offbeat items like Sasquatch statues and glow in the dark toilet seats. --CNN, January 28, 2015

Catalogs floated in dark matter somewhere between seat pocket and a wrinkle in time. Where were you when the sky began raining solar-powered cooling hats and serenity cat pods? Many had just heard that the universe may not have exploded from a single point. The crowds trampled each other to catch the squirrel tree climber sculptures and plush referee turkey hats. In an alternate universe time ran backwards. Some were maimed by the dinosaur trophy friezes and peacock dreams mirrored plaques. The volley of God-hand statues with cradled cats whistled down and you reconsidered the notion of pi. Were you one of the first to catch a wrist cell phone carrier or head massagers, each one unique like melting snowflakes or conjoined twins? The fabric of the universe was weary. Millions marched with wine glass holder necklaces and alien butlers, waistband stretchers and sling couture, slumber sleeves and Siamese blankets. Nothing lasts forever except ideas of forever. Spaces between borders filled with a new theory of universal expansion. The deluge ended somewhere over the Rockies. The fasten seat belt lights dinged and you woke with dried spittle crusting lips, hoping you didn’t snore or feel up the person in the next seat over. The dream of owning everything remained. Your hand trembled to open the window shade. The person next to you sighed. The crinkle of paper. The light looking like it was made.

A previous contributor to The New Verse News, Martin Ott is the author of six books of poetry and fiction, including the forthcoming books Underdays (University of Notre Dame Press) and Interrogations (Fomite Press).

the bear’s gravelly voice,
crackles like a radio broadcast
heard late at night
in a Lada careening

down the highway to Donetsk,
“Cousins,”
he pauses to lift a thick nailed paw,

“always, we were one.”

Aileen Bassis is a visual artist in Jersey City working in book arts, printmaking, photography and installation. Her use of text in art led her to explore another creative life as a poet. Her poems have found homes in many publications including Gravel Magazine, Milo Journal, Specs Journal, Spillway, Grey Sparrow Journal and Amoskeag.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Leave quickly. Pack the remnants
of your human dignity: a change
of underwear, a toothless comb.
Put name tags and addresses
on your luggage to make sure
it is returned. "Take care of yourself."
"Don't stay away too long."

Expect to be stomped, squeezed into cattle cars.
Sing the national anthem
through the rattling slats.
But into what country is escape possible?
There is no Poland anymore.
"Your journey is outside history.
With history comes understanding."
Disfigured bodies look like question marks.

The trains always arrive in the fright of night.
Demons dressed in midnight and truncheons yank
fouled bodies from the car.
A woman drops her suitcase;
a dead baby falls out.

Dogs gnaw toes and fingers
into bloody stubs.
"The air smells like burnt sugar. "
You breathe in the hearts
and minds of your neighbors from Lodz
who arrived before you.
The selection process starts:
Death now or death later—that's the choice.

But death will not free you
from Auschwitz. Each night
the dead are counted
in the lineup at the Appelplatz.
Their bodies searched
for crumbs of green bread,
but their pockets are always empty.
Prisoners prop them up
in the barracks to get their share
of thin soup and lice-thick bread.

A man with typhoid
and no eye for his socket
whispers to the corpse next to him:
"You must remember when I can't."

A voice across the shadows warns,
"We were not brought here to think.
We are here to survive."

Author's note: This poem is indebted to and quotes from the survivors of the Holocaust whose interviews are included in Broken Silence, a series of five foreign language films collected by Steven Spielberg and the Shoah Visual History Foundation and produced by James Moll.Philip C. Kolin, University Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Southern Mississippi, is the editor of The Southern Quarterly and has published more than 30 scholarly books on African American playwrights, Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Also a poet, Kolin has published five books of poems, the most recent being Reading God's Handwriting: Poems (Kaufmann, 2012), as well as hundreds of poems in such journals as the Michigan Quarterly Review, Louisiana Literature, South Carolina Review, Christian Century, Spiritus, Seminary Ridge Review, America, and has co-edited Hurricane Blues: Poems about Katrina and Rita (Southwest Missouri UP, 2006) with Susan Swartwout.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

“Normally, we wouldn't call something a living fossil. But the name seems tailor-made for the frilled shark, whose roots are traced to 80 million years ago.” --Bill Chappell, NPR, January 21, 2015. Phot source: Reddit.

Your cat and dog
communicate well-
enough to earn
a place inside
and remind us
domestication is
a two-way street

We speak
to our pets
and they respond
in their own way
which often means:

not speaking

turning to stare
at anything but you

walking away

I sometimes say
"you're a fake wolf"
to my dog
and I mean it
because it's true;
though I'm a wolf fan
when I wake
to find him standing over me
it's creepy enough

I would never say
you look primitive
to the dog
since who am I
to judge—
any creature
here today
has earned the right
to live among us

Mark Danowsky’s poetry has appeared in Apiary, Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Red River Review, Right Hand Pointing, Snow Monkey and The New Verse News. His poem "5am Summer Storm"won Imitation Fruit’s “Animals and Their Human’s” Contest, in 2013. Originally from the Philadelphia area, Mark currently lives in a van down by the Susquehanna River. He works for a private detective agency and is assistant copy editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.

Monday, January 26, 2015

The canary yellow L.A. home where “Fahrenheit 451” author Ray Bradbury resided for more than 50 years was demolished last week, according to the Los Angeles Times. The culprit: none other than Thom Mayne. The Pritzker winner has never been known to be nostalgic; in the wake of MoMA’s decision to raze the Tod Williams Billie Tsien's American Folk Art Museum, he had noted simply that, “All of our work issomewhat ephemeral.” So it comes as little surprise that shortly after he and wife Blythe Alison-Mayne purchased Bradbury’s former property for $1.76 million, the Times reports, the walls started coming down. --Janelle Zara, Architizer, January 20, 2015. Photo by John King Tarpinian, File 770.

"Bradbury Landing is a place on the planet Mars located in Gale crater. It marks the landing site of Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover on August 6, 2012. The location was named by NASA for Ray Bradbury on August 22, 2012, his 92nd birthday, in honor of the author who died a few months earlier, on June 5. The coordinates of the landing site are: 4.5895°S 137.4417°E." --Wikipedia

In a dream last night
My young son and I
Descended the steps
To the Bradbury house
Basement, where he
Wrote most of his work,
The walls lined with
Posters of book covers:Fahrenheit 451 andThe Martian Chronicles,
Scent of used books
And typewriter oil.
And there, as I placed
An arm around my son,
Sat Bradbury’s desk,
The man who has a
Spot on Mars named
After him, untouched,
And I’m sure untouched
Even when Mars itself
Is finally developed
By future architects.
My life is ephemeral,
My son’s life too, yet
I recall, in that dream,
Thinking with absolute
Wonder, how the house,
The Ray Bradbury House,
Smelled of used books
And typewriter oil.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems, My Earthbound Eye, in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

The Society for Creative Anachronism is an international organization dedicated to researching and re-creating the arts and skills of pre-17th-century Europe. Members, dressed in clothing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, attend events which feature tournaments, royal courts, feasts, dancing, various classes & workshops, and more. --SCA

A man who died five minutes back
is standing at the action’s edge
and watching his army regroup
for another charge.The war beginsin February, he says, as pennants
wave in Sunday sunshine
and dust clouds are rising around
the bright warriors
in the park. You seesomeone in black and red you wantto kill him, that’s how it is. Todayit’s only practice for whenthe forces to gather at Queen Creek.The rules say that if you’re hitwhere the armor doesn’t cover, you die.See this? He indicates the metal
cut to fit around his upper arm. It’sa Left Turn sign.
From the yellow eagle
on a dark blue shield
to banners in black, colors show who
is on one side and who on the other,
while the plan discovered today
is for
someone to infiltrate a crowd and stand
next to his enemy, looking so much
like him as to render violence
invisible until
the bomb explodes
leaving no chance for the dead
to move away from the action
to touch the Resurrection Pole and be
allowed to fight again.

David Chorlton came to Arizona in 1978 after living in England and Austria. He has spent more than three decades stretched between cultures and writing poetry, the pick of which has just appeared as his Selected Poems, from FutureCycle Press.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

A pair of small alien worlds, Ceres and Pluto, move into the spotlight this year as spacecraft arrive at their cosmic shores for the first time. NASA's Dawn spacecraft released its first views of Ceres on Monday, already hinting at previously unknown craters. Still ahead for NASA's New Horizons probe is former planet Pluto, billions of miles from Ceres and the king of a distant, icy realm. Both are dwarf planets, mini-worlds that just don't make the cut as official planets. It's a vast population of worldlets that scientists don't know much about. But if all goes according to plan, that will change starting now. And it's about time the little guys got some attention. --Nadia Drake for National Geographic, January 21, 2015

Friday, January 23, 2015

I asked the angels
for something to help
carry me through the day
since I don’t yet have visible wings
and soon in front of my eyes
water flowed underneath ice
encasing a maple branch
like sap only external,
building up like a wave
then surging through
in the one eight inch space
between bark and hard clear ice
flowing to the crotch of the branch
and underneath the lumped ice there
reaching the end of the branch, dripping once,
the wave surging, cresting, flowing
down the maple’s thin arm, drip
and again, no end
to this bounty.

Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee, won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press. Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette. She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

ELMO, Mo. AP, January 20, 2015 • A 9-month-old northwestern Missouri boy is dead after his 5-year-old brother playing with a handgun accidentally shot him in the head. Nodaway County Sheriff Darren White says the baby was pronounced dead at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City just before noon on Monday. The Kansas City Star reports that emergency responders were called to a home in Elmo around 9 a.m. Monday after a 5-year-old found a loaded .22 caliber handgun and apparently was handling it when it fired. White says the bullet struck the 9-month-old, who was in a playpen. The sheriff says there is no reason to believe the shooting was anything other than an accident.

There was every reason.

Stupidity.

The father was not there.
Absence.

The mother was in the kitchen.
Multi-task.

The baby was in the playpen.
Safety.

The five-year-old found the 22-caliber Magnum revolver.
Curiosity.

It was near a bed.
Paranoia.

It was loaded.
Paranoia.

He pulled the trigger.
Imitation.

The baby died inside his microcosm.
Innocence.

A gun killed a baby brother.
Insanity.

Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of five books of poetry and three chapbooks. She lives part-time in Washington, D.C., where she is a member of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The rest of the time, she is in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

One word was noticeably missing from President Barack Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday: guns. In a sign that the sun has set on Obama's gun control agenda, the president's prepared remarks contained no mention of the issue. Two years after the shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the absence of guns from Obama's speech marked a departure from previous years, in which the president urged Congress to pass legislation aimed at reducing gun violence in America. Obama made a thinly veiled reference to mass shootings while discussing national tragedies that have brought Americans together. "I’ve mourned with grieving families in Tucson and Newtown; in Boston, West, Texas, and West Virginia," he said. --Sabrina Siddiqui, HuffPost Politics, January 21, 2015

If Congress had lead balls

in its hearts, brains,

pelves

If images of dead school

children grew

so palpable, intimate

that their fever

opened a passageway

through the sizzling

sun, to eternity

and back,

would the madness

stop then? Would

crimson hollow paired

growths on Wayne

LaPierre’s head

show themselves, as

he scribbles his want

list for bought

and sold baby-kissers,

counting bankroll gore,

casting cruel pecuniary

manufacturer’s

satanic spells

on the provoked,

tremulous, spurred on

by Domitian,

dominus et dues,

shielded by

mutant constitution?

Gil Hoy is a regular contributor to The New Verse News. He is a Boston trial lawyer and studied poetry at Boston University, majoring in philosophy. Gil started writing his own poetry and fiction in February of last year. Since then, his poems and fiction have been published in multiple journals, most recently in The Potomac, The Zodiac Review, Harbinger Asylum and Earl of Plaid Literary Journal.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Humanity seems stuck
In a time tunnel taking it
To its cold-blooded roots

When nations were slaughtered
For daring to practice
Their own chosen faith

As men built empires
On the bodies of those
Too weak to withstand them

Till the point was reached
When might was measured
By the number of dead

Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.

Good news — bright motes afloat in the dark
stream of evening commentary. Bite bits about
those few who work dead water eddies, weedy
margins, bring relief to the poorest, the least.
They only ask that they may give, carry water
in a sieve and yet will shame use daily.

If you're waiting for The Coming you're too late.
That event is not unique but continuous,
goodness divided as were loaves and fishes.
These crumbly bits are all that we will get.

Robert M. Chute's book of poetry based on scientific articles, Reading Nature, is available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Tributes of drawings, flowers, pens and candles are left in front of the Charlie Hebdo offices on January 14, 2015 in Paris, France. (Photo by Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images via New York Observer)

I am walking down the street at night, on my way home from a party,
wearing an above the knee black skirt, and tall black boots.
The rest of me is covered with winter coat, scarf and gloves.
Only my face is showing and the small bit of stocking
from the middle of my knee to the top of my skirt. I've had wine
but not too much. I am happy, smiling, remembering moments
of conversation, silly asides, laughing 'til my belly hurt.
I reach my car, fish through my bag for my keys, and I am punched
hard, knocked down, dragged away from my car to the back
of the parking lot where it is dark, where the creek runs.
I am hit again and again. I am raped and I am cut. I am discarded,
half-conscious with clumps of frozen leaves.
I am Charlie.

Susan Gerardi Bello is a member of the New York City-based poetry community Brevitas and U.S. 1 Poets' Cooperative in Princeton. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including the Paterson Literary Review and U.S. 1 Worksheets as well as on New York Public Radio. Her poem "The Game" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Stanislavski as the Knight in The Society of Art and Literature's 1888 production of Pushkin's The Miserly Knight.

Welcome to Russia circa 1991.

Ask but do not answer. Survive.

Positions are fickle. Open lies.

Wolf eyes. Uniform responses.

Family fuck ups and generations of militants.

Socialist foxes sucking on the nothings of your neighbor.

Zone out. Fade out.

Whatever.

You only exist in the reflection of your money.

Don’t give input, just spend,

Survive.

Push past the thieves and the games.

Don’t switch sides, nothing will change.

Sleep, bitch.

I come from a battered peoples

I may look white, but I am muddied grey

From centuries of waiting for a parent

To teach my people how to live.

How to take a land so spanning and reign it right

How to use the resource full and make it use full

How to take the money out of politicians pockets and put it into schools.

My sixteen year old cousin doesn’t go to school

She skips class to post pictures of herself on Tumblr

She skips class because no one taught her not to

Because the chances of her getting into college

Ride on the bank account of her mother

And the ride is short

And admission is partial.

I do not know how to tell her to behave in a country that teaches her daily to do what’s easy

To try less.

To play dumb.

To leave it to those in charge.

I do not know how to love a country that gets away with murder, daily.

I do not know how to love a jungle,

A country with no name, just letters

that get shifted with each new president

who promises my people rights

and shits on them more than the last.

I do not know how to love a coward,

A country that does not fight back

A country that jails Robin Hood and cheers for the Joker

A country that gives itself a bad rep

With people that make me look bad.

I am so sick of being related to

The mafia

The winter cold

The bad guy in every fucking movie

The mail-order bride

The Stalin

The Putin

The protests

The Pussy Riot,

The misuse of the word babushka, which means grandmother, you fuckers

The word sneaky

The word evil

The word corrupt

The word communist

The word red

The word hate

The word fear

I have been soiled with hate and fear for years.

I had to put five thousand miles between us to feel safe,

And I’m still scared.

But I miss her,

And every time I go there, I feel her underneath my feet, weeping.

Laughter is universal.

So is pain and pride.

But somehow here, at home, everything is more alive.

Even the cigarette buds and pollen that pollute this city

Layer by layer.

But next to the industrial remnants stands a tree more beautiful than your own mother

And you breathe a sigh of relief

And remember about hope

And what could be

If only they cared more.

If only you cared more.

Apprehension lingers on your spine

Like food stuck in your teeth

And Pushkin’s “Land of Moscow” comes to mind:

“And where the luxury was thriving,

In shady parks and gardens, in the past,

Where myrtle was fragrant, limes were shining,

There now are just coals, ash, and dust.”

He’s right, the scent of dust is overbearing but what about the rose haw and the conifers?

There are still things to fight for,

Aren’t there?

Tatyana Muradov was born in Moscow, Russia and raised in a small town in Texas. She moved to New York two years ago and since then, has been a part of the poetry scene there in the city performing for spoken word/slam teams such as LouderArts and Urbana.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Phoebe Jonchuck died Thursday when she was tossed from the Dick Misener Bridge in St. Petersburg. At her memorial service Wednesday in Tampa, those who knew her spoke of a girl with an infectious smile who learned to love going to school and told friends she wanted to be a dancer when she grew up. There was scant mention of John Jonchuck, 25, her father, who remains jailed, accused of dropping the little girl to her death. --Dan Sullivan, Tampa Bay Times, January 14, 2015

Long hair and the voice of a hummingbird
Long hair and the voice of a hummingbird
I want a ticket to anywhere
I want a ticket to anywhere
Hummingbirds want a stronger voice, and I
long for anywhere, my ticket in my hair

Oh daddy dear you know you’re still number one
Oh daddy dear you know you’re still number one
This is just a fairytale happening in a supermarket
This is just a fairytale happening in a supermarket
Dear daddy: you’re a number in a supermarket
just as this is happening. Oh, one fairytale stills.

Because he’s all I ever knew of love
Because he’s all I ever knew of love
He only loves those things because he loves to see them break
He only loves those things because he loves to see them break
I break because he’s all he ever knew of love, because
those things he sees love, love only him too.

Oh daddy, I love you because you were
my ticket to anywhere, because all you ever knew of love
was long hair, stillness, and numbers in a supermarket. You said:
These things just happen, dear
I want the voice of a hummingbird, a fairytale one,
who only loves to see me unbroken.

Author's note: Lyrics borrowed from the following artists and songs, in order: “Can You Hear Me?” by Missy Elliott featuring TLC; “Fast Car,” by Tracey Chapman; “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper; “Fairytale in a Supermarket” by The Raincoats; “Criminal” by Fiona Apple; “Doll Parts” by Hole.Marybeth Rua-Larsen is a lover of form in poetry. Just about any form. Her chapbook Nothing In-Between was released from Barefoot Muse Press last year.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

HAYDEN, Idaho — A mom shopping at a Walmart store died Tuesday after her toddler, who was left in a shopping cart, reached into her purse and accidentally discharged her handgun, authorities said. Veronica J. Rutledge, 29, of Blackfoot, Idaho, had gone to the store in this Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, suburb with four children in tow at mid-morning. Her 2-year-old son, who was sitting in the shopping cart, reached into his mother's purse, causing the small-caliber handgun to discharge one time, said Lt. Stu Miller, Kootenai County Sheriff's Office spokesman. "It appears to be a pretty tragic accident," Miller said. Rutledge was dead by the time deputies arrived. --USA Today, December 31, 2014. Image: Veronica J. Rutledge Facebook Photo via The Independent (UK)

A purse is a lure, a bright magnet
For fishing fingers. All kids know
The mom keeps stuff they shouldn’t have,
Shiny car keys, loose change, the tube
Of pills that look like candy.

Grab at her purse to irritate
The mom, to get her attention
As she drifts from aisle to aisle
Deliberating, saying no
To whines and pleas.

This kid, only two, sitting in the cart,
Swung his fat legs and seized
Her purse. A toy like the cops
Have on TV. Says bang
And pulls the trigger. Wow, mom
For just a second, looked mad.
He shut his eyes.

Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize. Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014: Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.

heads) had been spliced, spurting forth
ink-splotched faces, the aphorisms

we drew in bubbles, their blood-vowels /
as if bullets we drove into the walls

of easels, blithely / as if specks of flesh
carving out their wounds, sinew

torn in watercolor, shards of glass painted
in felt-tips / as if the tilt of our

mouths in these scenes, the seconds we
almost smiled between smearing

steeple-minaret-altar as if wings / as if
hierologists of tomorrows,

revealing our schisms, our compositions
in grays and whitespace/ as

if ours, a name stenciled on drywall, on
acid-free paper, beneath our

benedictions, beneath the as if / as if
beneath the / if /

Ranjani Murali received her MFA in poetry from George Mason University. Her poetry, nonfiction and translations have appeared in Pratilipi, Phoebe, elimae, Kartika Review and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2014 Srinivas Rayaprol Prize and has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and the Vermont Studio Center.

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Although the editors and audience of The New Verse News have a politically progressive bias, we welcome well-written verses of various visions and viewpoints.

In any event, opinions expressed in The New Verse News are those of the poems' writers (or, perhaps, only of the poems' speakers) and not necessarily those of the editors, the audience, or other contributors to the site.

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